by Timothy Zahn
Calandra licked her lips. “You feel it too, don’t you?” she asked quietly.
I waved my hands helplessly. “I don’t know what I feel,” I had to admit. “Something here isn’t right … but I have no idea what it is.”
Calandra took a deep breath. “Me neither. And I don’t like not knowing.” She gestured to the lone thunderhead on our bluff, quivering in the breeze a half meter from the bluff’s outer edge. “Let’s have a look.”
Standing at my cubicle window in the Carillon Building, a hundred twenty stories above ground, I’d never had even a twinge of acrophobia. Walking in a steady wind toward the edge of an open-air bluff a tenth that height was something else entirely, and I had to force myself to go the last couple of meters. “Looks reasonably normal to me,” I said, dropping to my knees beside the thunderhead.
“Pretty hard rock it’s dug into,” Calandra pointed out, scratching at the cracked rock at its base with a fingernail. “The spore or whatever must have found a crack or hollow to germinate in.”
I thought about that. “Maybe. On the other hand … there are an awful lot of cracks up here.”
She hissed softly between her teeth. “Or in other words, why is there just one.” Slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
I looked at the thunderhead again. A fungoid plant, stuck all alone in the middle of a rocky clifftop without other plants or decaying material anywhere around. A deep root system, perhaps, tapping into some source of nutrients within the rock itself? “Maybe it just so happens that thunderheads like fusion drive emissions,” I suggested, only half humorously.
She shivered. “I don’t like that idea at all,” she said quietly.
I thought about it. If we were, in fact, sitting on top of a smuggler hideout … “Neither do I,” I admitted.
Almost hesitantly, she reached out and touched the thunderhead’s outer skin, resting her fingers there for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she lowered her hand and climbed back to her feet. “There’s nothing here. Come on—let’s go back.”
We headed back across the bluff to where the two ridges began their sloping way down. “You want to try the other one this time, or stick with the one we already know?” I asked.
“Let’s stay with the known,” Calandra said. “I’m too tired to have to figure out new footing.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. Something on the second ridge caught my eye—“Hold it a second,” I said, catching hold of her arm.
“What?” she asked, her voice suddenly taut.
I pointed down the ridge. “Discolored spots in the rock, about twenty centimeters across each—there and there; see? In fact,” I amended, an odd tightness settling into my stomach, “they go all the way down.”
She stared down the ridge in silence for a long minute. Then, still without speaking, she started down toward them.
The second ridge was, fortunately, as easy to climb as the first had been. The nearest of the discolorations was perhaps ten meters down, and we reached it without difficulty. Squatting awkwardly on the slope, Calandra below the spot and I above it, we gave it a careful look.
It was clear right from the start that the discoloration hadn’t been my imagination; equally clear was the fact that it wasn’t just a chance placement of different colored rock. The patch was obviously a changed section of the stone immediately around it …
I reached out to touch it. Smooth, or at least smoother than the rest of the surrounding rock. Wind or water treating could account for that, possibly, except that there was no reason I could see why one section would be so affected and a nearby one not. Off-colored rock; with a shiny, almost glassy hint to it …
I looked up and met Calandra’s eye … and I could tell she’d reached the same conclusion I had. “It’s been heat-treated,” I said quietly.
Calandra licked her lips. “There’s nothing here that could do that,” she almost whispered. “Nothing at all.”
The mountains melt like wax before the God of all the earth …
I swallowed hard, fighting back the dark, half-remembered fears of childhood. Spall was not—could not be—the seat of God’s kingdom. Period. There was a reasonable explanation for what had happened here—a reasonable, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for what had happened here.
All I had to do was find it.
My probing fingertips caught something else. “Hair-line cracks,” I grunted to Calandra.
She nodded. “There’s a whole network of them,” she said absently. “More visible from my angle, I guess. They seem to radiate from the glazed part outward into the surrounding rock.”
I leaned forward to see. “Cracks from the heating?” I hazarded.
She shrugged, oddly hunch-shouldered. For all her current rejection of her faith, she’d had the same upbringing I had … upbringing that would have included the same scriptures about God’s fire and lightning that were currently bouncing around my own mind. “Maybe,” she said. “They look a lot like the cracks around the thunderhead up there, though.”
I looked back down again, chagrined that I hadn’t made that connection myself. “Maybe that’s the answer, then,” I suggested slowly. “Maybe these are spots where there were once thunderheads.”
She snorted. “Oh, certainly. What, no one ever taught them not to play with fire when they were seedlings?”
Under other circumstances I might have tossed out a pointed reference to God’s lightning. But with a sense of creepiness growing steadily around me, I couldn’t even resent her sarcasm. “It’s not that crazy an idea,” I told her. “I’ve heard of plants whose seeds germinate best after a forest fire has passed through the area. Why not one which spontaneously burns down at the end of its life to give that kind of seed a good head start?”
“Have you ever heard of a plant like that?” she countered.
“No. But neither of us is exactly steeped in botanical knowledge.”
Her eyes seemed to defocus for a moment … as if trying to see something that still wasn’t quite there. “True,” she said at last. “I just hope it’s really that simple.”
There were housekeeping chores to be done when we reached bottom; chores that enabled me to temporarily ignore the odd feeling hovering at the edge of my mind. By the time we’d set up our firepatch flatlantern and gotten it started, the sun was down; by the time we’d sorted out and eaten our pac-heated meals, it was full night.
And as we sat quietly on opposite sides of the firepatch, lost in our own private worlds, the mystery inevitably returned to my thoughts.
“Any progress?” Calandra asked, her face eerie looking in the glow of the firepatch.
I shrugged. Irritating though Calandra could be, a portion of my mind noted dimly, it was sometimes nice to be with someone who didn’t have to communicate entirely through words. “Maybe,” I told her. “I presume we can eliminate right away the possibility of volcanic activity on those slopes?”
“I know even less about geology than I do about botany,” she said dryly. “But I find it hard to believe this is volcanic rock.”
I nodded. “Okay, then. Suppose, for sake of argument, that the thunderheads have a high metallic content.”
“All right,” she said after a slight pause. “I guess I can suppose that. So … ?”
“So high metal content would imply good electrical conductivity,” I said. “Which would make them likely targets during thunderstorms.”
“So all the ones that happened to grow on the slope got blasted off, while the ones right on top didn’t?”
“The ones on top might be younger,” I reminded her. “We don’t have any idea how old the heat-treated parts are, or how long a thunderhead’s lifespan is.”
She waved upward, the motion casting a ragged shadow on the ridge behind her. “It still doesn’t make sense,” she sighed. “None of it does. Why would one group of thunderheads prefer—no; insist on—living among a tangle of other plants out in full sunlight, while another group works very hard to
drill its members into solid rock on cliff faces? While a third packs together in shadow like lonely walruses,” she added, gesturing at the sea of thunderheads faintly visible in the reflected light.
I shrugged helplessly. “Maybe they’re three different species,” I said. “Maybe they behave differently at different parts of their life cycle. Maybe they’re just highly adaptable and can live and grow no matter what happens around them. Some things are like that; others aren’t.”
I hadn’t intended the comment to sound accusing … but it did anyway, and both of us heard it. “Sometimes that kind of struggle isn’t worth it,” she said quietly, her eyes steady on me.
For a moment we gazed at each other, and I felt the rush of suppressed emotion flowing like white-water through her. “What happened?” I asked softly.
Her eyes were still on me, but her attention had turned inward. To thoughts, and memories, and feelings … and, perhaps, to the need to talk about it all. “Aaron Balaam darMaupine happened,” she said at last. “Do you remember what it was like to be sixteen?”
I thought back. Awkwardness, both physical and social. Confusion, and the questioning of things long taken for granted. A profound need to be accepted, to be like all the others. An equally profound terror that I wasn’t, and would never be. “I remember enough of it,” I said.
“I was sixteen when darMaupine’s Kingdom of God was toppled,” she said, her voice echoing old pain. “When the Patri and colonies began to truly hate the Watchers.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “You were, what, ten when that happened?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven. Which meant you were still pretty much locked safely away in the Watcher womb.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t. I’d already spent a lot of time out in the non-Watcher world—darMaupine practically ordered us to do that. ‘Do you not realize that the holy people of God are to be the judges of the world?’—that was one of his favorite quotes. I’d spent time out of the settlement. Made a lot of … friends.”
She dropped her gaze to the firepatch, a hand coming up to daub briefly at her eyes. “I was sixteen, Gilead. I … couldn’t take the hatred and … rejection I felt everywhere. And I couldn’t believe a loving God would have permitted someone as gifted as darMaupine to be so badly corrupted.”
I licked my lips. “We’re creatures of free will,” I said quietly. “By definition, that means God allows us to choose whether to use our talents for or against Him.”
“I know all the arguments,” Calandra said, shaking her head. “But arguments didn’t help. I was hurting … and all the Watchers who were left were too busy fighting off their own destruction to care about something as unimportant as a teenager’s crisis of faith. I left just as soon as I could.”
“And have been running ever since?”
A bitter smile touched her lips. “But the running’s going to stop now, isn’t it? Can’t run any more after you’ve been at the Deadman Switch.”
“Calandra—”
“You suppose it’s my punishment for quitting?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly. “You suppose God considers it heresy that I ran out when my questions outnumbered my answers?”
“If God were that impatient He would have rolled up the universe by now and put it away in a closet,” I sighed. “We just have to trust that He’s got things under some kind of control. Whether we understand what He’s doing or not.”
She raised her eyes back to mine again. “So why did you run away?”
I hesitated. I had promised myself never to tell this to anyone else … “I left because there wasn’t any way to make money in Cana,” I told her. “And I wanted to make money.”
She stared at me for a long minute. “I don’t believe you.”
“Everyone in Cana believes it,” I said, feeling a flicker of pain. Pain I thought I’d laid to rest long ago.
“Then they haven’t seen you lately. Have they?”
I shrugged fractionally. “It’s been about nine years.”
Her gaze hardened. “Don’t lie to me, Gilead. DarMaupine and his people lied to me; I won’t be lied to again.”
I took a deep breath. “I earn about a hundred fifty thousand a year working for Lord Kelsey-Ramos.”
She snorted. “I’ve lived on as little as six.”
“I live on five.”
Silence. Then, slowly, she nodded. “Who knows?”
“Cana’s chief elder. No one else.”
“Why not?”
“What purpose would it serve? To save my reputation among them?”
“Your reputation’s very important to you.”
I bit at the back of my lip. She was right, of course. “So is their dignity as human beings,” I said quietly. “Your Bethel settlement got crushed in the aftermath of darMaupine, Calandra—for Cana, it’s a matter of being slowly strangled to death. Without my contribution, I really don’t think they could survive as a community any more.” I caught her eye. “You really want them to know that?”
Her lip twisted. But it was a soft sort of twist, with more sympathy to it than contempt. “And you risk throwing that away to help me?”
It was something I’d thought about a great deal lately. Usually late at night, alone in the dark. “I have a weakness for lost causes, I suppose,” I said, forcing a smile.
She dropped her eyes, turned her head to gaze out at the thunderheads. “Can’t get much more lost than I am …”
She trailed off, and abruptly her sense sharpened. “What?” I whispered.
For a half dozen heartbeats she didn’t answer … but slowly her sense changed to disbelief. Disbelief, and quiet horror. “Do you feel it?” she whispered.
I followed her gaze, stretching out with all my skill. The thunderheads were a ghostly sea of faint white patches, some of them seeming to quiver in the breeze. The air about me was rich in subtle sounds … subtle aromas … subtle sensations …
And at last I saw what Calandra had seen.
I looked back at her. Our eyes met; and together we uncrossed our legs and stood up, picking up our survival pack flashlights as we did so. She moved around the firepatch, stepped close to me, her muscles trembling with emotion. For another moment we stood like that, holding each other tightly, our shadows stretching across the milky white sea. Then, setting my teeth, I raised my light, set it for tight beam, and flicked it on.
A narrow cone of light lanced out … and even as I squinted against it, I felt the responding ripple, and knew that what we’d both sensed had indeed been the truth.
The thunderheads were alive. Alive, and aware … and watching us.
Chapter 19
FOR A LONG MOMENT we just stood there. “This is crazy,” I said at last. “I mean, really crazy. They’re plants, for heaven’s sake.”
Close beside me, Calandra shivered. “Are they?”
“Of cour—” The reflexive retort died halfway out. “What else could they be?”
“There are things called sessile animals that spend all or part of their lives attached to trees,” she said mechanically, her eyes darting about the dirty-white shapes laid out before us. “I just don’t … how could the original survey teams have missed something like this?”
I moved my flashlight, watched the incredibly subtle ripple of reaction move with it. “Because they weren’t Watchers,” I said grimly.
She took a deep breath. “Let’s take a closer look.”
Together, we walked across the uneven ground. Calandra knelt down beside the first thunderhead we reached, touched it lightly. “Turn the light on it.”
I did as instructed. “Well?”
She pursed her lips. “There’s a … it’s a little like a vibration, but not exactly. I felt it in the thunderhead on top of the bluff, too, when we were up there.”
I twisted my head, looking up at the dark shape silhouetted against the stars. “You think they could be mobile at some stage of their lives?”
“Either that, or else they’re aw
fully good at throwing seeds …”
She trailed off, and we looked at each other. “The discolored spots,” I said, an odd sense of unreality seeping into me. “The one on top is the last of a whole line of the things.”
Calandra nodded, her eyes haunted. “They could only get their seeds a short ways uphill. So they just kept at it until they got one onto the top.”
“But why—” I stopped, turning again to look at the sea of thunderheads crowded between the buttes. No; not a sea of thunderheads … “It’s a city,” I breathed. “A city.” Which meant the ones atop the buttes—
“‘I shall stand at my post,’” Calandra quoted softly. “‘I shall station myself on my watch-tower, watching to see what God will say to me.’”
I looked again at the sky, my mouth dry. “They’re sentries,” I whispered. “Guarding the approaches.”
Calandra followed my gaze. “But guarding how? And against whom?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” But even as I said it I thought about the heat-treated spots on the ridge up the bluff … “What do you say,” I said carefully, “we kind of ease back, break camp, and get out of here.”
She hunched her shoulders fractionally. “It won’t help. They know we’re here.”
She was right—I could sense the unblinking attention focused on us. “Maybe they don’t realize we know what they are,” I told Calandra. Something in the back of my mind was screaming danger!— “Come on,” I snapped, taking her hand and pulling her all but bodily away from the thunderheads—
It came as a half seen, half felt sense of a dark mass falling from the sky; and even as we both ducked reflexively there was the sharp crack of suddenly released pressure, and we were abruptly in the middle of a cloud of thick white smoke. A sweet-bitter smell flooded my nostrils, and I clamped a hand over my face to try and keep it out. But too late. Already I could feel my arms and legs going numb. I tried to take a step, stumbled instead to my knees, dragging Calandra down with me as my hand refused to release its grip on hers. Together we sprawled onto the ground, and a moment later I found myself on my back. Overhead, the fog parted slightly, enough to give me a glimpse of the pattern of lights hovering overhead.
